[FOM] mereology reference and comment

[Robert Smith]

There is a very good short article about mereology, with references, at

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mereology/


I have always been skeptical of this "part/whole" concept and considered it
ontologically simplistic.  Working with medical databases, for example,
where one finds a great variety of ways of express properties and "parts" of
objects leads me to believe that the variety of kinds of connections is
large and the "proper" representation often a function of the pragmatics of
the use case as much as anything.

Obviously set theory is more than adequate to describe these relationships
in principle.  In practice, RDBMS and object-oriented modelling are more
practical tools.